00:00Good afternoon. My name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor and Associates Newspapers.
00:05Really lovely to speak to Sarah Montgomery this afternoon in Worthing. Now, Sarah, you've got a
00:10really intriguing, really exciting new way of selling books, a new approach, which, well,
00:15you explain Bookkind. Yeah, so Bookkind, which launched a couple of months ago now,
00:21is an online bookshop. You can buy over 250,000 books there, any book you like.
00:27But the unique thing about it is that we donate 10 percent of the value of your purchase to one of
00:34our charity partners. We partner with currently with eight charities. And so 10 percent of the
00:41value of your purchase can go to anything from supporting racial justice in the Runnymede Trust,
00:48to Great Ormond Street, to Dementia UK, Maggie's Mental Health Foundation. So whatever you feel
00:54passionately about, you can buy the books you love and donate to charities.
00:59And you make the choice as the book buyer, do you? Which of the eight?
01:03That's right. So as the buyer, you can select at checkout which of the eight charity courses you
01:10would like to donate. It's soon to go up to 11.
01:12It's soon to go up to 11. So yeah, keep watching this space. We've got some very exciting new kind
01:18of charity partners in the wings waiting to join us.
01:21I was asking you where that 10 percent comes from. And that's your 10 percent as the bookseller.
01:25That's very generous, isn't it?
01:27Thank you. Well, yes. I mean, it has to come from somewhere and it's not going to come from the
01:32authors or the publishers or the wholesalers. So it comes from us. But it's something we feel very
01:39passionately about. We want to be able to feel like we're doing really good things with books.
01:44We care about books. We care about all of these causes. And to be in a position that we can donate
01:51to charities, it feels like such a privilege. Yeah. And you're saying building lists around
01:55the causes as well, which is essentially hugely important, isn't it? And a great potential reading
02:00for people who are affected suddenly by the causes that you are supporting.
02:03That's right. I mean, it's quite hard to find curated lists around if you're going through
02:10a cancer journey or if you have someone who's suffering with dementia. To find a list of all
02:16of the good books around that subject area is quite challenging at the moment. So we're trying to be
02:22hard to keep that up to date, to keep it fresh, to keep adding new books each month, to work with
02:27authors to help get the message about their books out there. So we hopefully are providing a useful
02:34service. Absolutely. And a lot of work to set this up from scratch, obviously. But what's the initial
02:40feeling? Is it going well, do you think? Early days, obviously, but so far?
02:44It's early days. It's early days. You know, as I said, building a brand from scratch is not easy. And so
02:52we need everybody to get behind it and kind of support it. And if you're going to buy books,
02:57you can get the books you want, but you can donate to charity. So, you know, it's going to take time
03:03to get to where we want to, but we're absolutely determined to make Bookkind one of the leading
03:08book retailers in the UK. And for a start, it's such a cracking title, isn't it? It says it all, doesn't it?
03:14Yeah, well, hopefully, I think it I think it kind of does what it says on the tin. Yeah.
03:22Fantastic. Well, good luck with it. Congratulations on setting it up. And
03:25it sounds brilliant. Lovely to speak to you very much. Thank you.
